"intelligent" disk drives

[Tony Duell]

> 
> > As an aside, IMHO one of the worst mistakes commodore made was that the 
> > 8050 could not at least read the disks of the earlier drives. 
> 
> But then there might have been a situation like the 4040 and the 1540/1541,
> where the gap is enough to let each read the other's floppies but too much to
> allow successful writing. There was a lot of cussing about that early on after

I don't see what there should be problems for those 2 drives to write 
each other's disks, at least not at the hardware level.

In any case, that's why I sead 'at least read'. The 8050 did have more 
tracks than the 4040, and we all know what problems are caused when a 
disk is iwritten by a narrower head than the one that formatted it [1]. But 
even being ale to read the disks would be a good start. Presumably 
software companies had to sell their programs in both 4040 and 8050 
formats, for example.

[1] Yes, I am aware the 8050 is a 100tpi drive. IMHO making it a 96tpi 
drive and allowing it to double-step to read 4040 disks would have made 
much more sense. 

-tony